Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Gamer Theory + Jheri Curls + Nostalgia

Blogger was in the sick bay for much of the day, so I wasn't able to post earlier, or even respond to a few of the comments. When this happened a year or so ago and I was in the flush of my enthusiasm about blogging, I used to take the tack of copying what I'd typed over into MS Word or Palm's note section, and then recopy it back into the screen once Blogger again was online, but today I just wanted to get moving, so the original post, like so many of its predecessors, is lost to posterity.

GAM3R 7H3ORY 1.1Instead, I thought I'd mention a fascinating site I came across this evening, via Julian Dibbell's article "Edit Me!" in this week's Village Voice, GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 (Gamer Theory). The site, created by Australian scholar and new media theorist McKenzie Wark in conjunction with the Institute for the Future of the Book, is a networked book(-in progress) that examines nine online games and gaming communities (The Cave to SimEarth), in a modular, tiered format of nine chapters of 25 paragraphs each. The networked book also allows any reader to offer online comments, critiques, corrections, queries, and other kinds of clarifications and emendations on the book's conceptualization and content. There are also affiliated fora for more extensive chat. Wark, who authored The Hacker's Manifesto (Harvard, 2004) and teaches at The New School University, specifically hopes to engender commentary on gaming as major media form, and says in the FAQ that he would like to use, with posters' permission, some of the concepts and commentary this nascent project generates in the printed work. So far I've only read "Allegory (on the Sims)," but the entire project really excites me, and I'm curious to see how it turns out, especially if Wark decides to keep a version of this networked online site alongside the printed, published text. I hope that it becomes a paradigm for many other kinds of future publishing projects; does anyone know of any other similar works online?

On the Institute for the Future of the Book site, there are other projects underway to check out as well.

El Jheri Curl CrewThanks go to Anthony Montgomery's Monaga blog, which pointed me to Felix Gillette's article in the same issue of the Voice on one of the notorious Washington Heights Dominican drug gangs of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Jheri Curls. I swear I'm not making that name up! The premise, at least based on the gang's name, would probably be utterly comical except that in reality they wrought considerably more terror than mere fashion faux-pas in their heyday. Gillette identifies several of their victims, including an outspoken neighborhood activist who refused to remain silent as they propagated their drug trade and paid with his life. Gillette notes that the gangs' leaders are mostly rusticating in prison in upstate New York, and have not had the chance to enjoy the Caribbean fruits of their ill-gotten gains, while in their place, a new scourge has hit their former stomping grounds: gentrification. Several of the new residents of the area that Gillette interviews are as blissfully unaware of the recent violent history as they are, I would imagine, of what a Jheri Curl is, or was. (And yes, I can assure any of my readers, you can still see them in their full efflorescence on selected streets of Chicago....)

NostalgiaNo, not the Tarkovsky film, which is actually Nostalghia, I believe, and, since it's one of his slowest and most visually poetic and grounded in ritual imagery and performance, will always be one of my aesthetic models and favorites, but an article, "The In-betweeners," by Philip Marchand in the Toronto Star, on why the Boomer generation (my immediate predecessors) doesn't match up to those who came before (my parents generation, i.e., those people born between 1926-1945, or the proverbial "Greatest," which I guess would include the cohort of my grandmother, who's in her 80s, and everyone else who were young adults during World War II and the Great Depression), and why those of us who follow in age (Generation X, Generation Y, Generation Z, AA, etc.) are doomed to be even more lackluster by comparison. You see, though Marchand claims he's not engaging in nostalgia, he still cites the genius of Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, Alice Munro (okay, you've got the read the argument) and others born in the period 1925-1945, and how their talents flowered in the 1960s, while post-then, we're looking at the lack of a common culture, short attention spans, too many people these days, grueling and unpleasant jobs, etc. MEDIOCRITY. He also notes (rightly, but cruelly) that Paul McCartney now looks like an old woman. The monster of television, naturally enough, makes an appearance.

A quote:

By contrast, we are now in an age when people are encouraged to "personalize their use of the media" and to join "virtual communities." As Joey Kramer would say, people are "kind of doing their own thing." The coherence of cultural conversations, and the general sense of meaningfulness, is breaking down. It is unthinkable now that any audience could care as much, or believe that religiously in its music, as the audience members at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that booed Bob Dylan for going electric.

I'm always skeptical of such arguments, which tend to romantic overgeneralizations, and which have been emanating from the mouths of annoying cultural commentators since the Medieval era ("Oh, how great it was when everyone in the country's name could be written in the Domesday Book"), and am doubly suspicious when Tom Wolfe, whose radar has been off since his sharply tuned The Bonfire of the Vanities (cf. drugs, class conflict, northern Manhattan, etc.) appeared, is cited for evidentiary reasons; but then I tend to repeat some version of these quasi-Spenglerian assessments to myself and others around me at least once a week. One might also ask whether these "Tweeners" match up to the crowds that gave us, say, Romanticism, late Romanticism, New England Wits, Transcendentalism, the Victorian novel, Impressionism, High Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, etc. Talk about a fall off! But seriously, I don't think it's so bad, even though at times I do. But I don't....

7 comments:

I keep thinking that perhaps this seeming descent into mediocrity is simply the fact that almost anyone nowadays can gain a more or less public voice by writing a godawful book/being blond and rich/fucking the wrong(right) person/beginning a blog. So everyone--geniuses and morons alike--is trying to be heard, creating an enervating, apathy-inducing cacophany. When I filter out the (admittedly almost overwhelming) irrelevant, there seem to my eyes, at least, to be as many geniuses and truly engaged intellectuals/artists/moral giants as there ever were (if not more since, thanks to globalization and the pervasiveness of media[tion]--by the way have you read de Zegontita's book?: HIGHLY reccommended and relevant; super-quick read--I know who Javier Marias, Thich Nhat Hanh and Cesaria Evora are). My two cents.

Kai, I was being ironic (as well as sarcastic) about the "mediocrity" tag, because really, it's a matter more of perspective than anything else. There have been people predicting the end of true culture or the dangers of technology or some other such doomsday scenario for centuries. The novel supposedly died 25 or 50 or 100 or 150 years ago, depending upon whom you consult, painting died with the Impressionists, then the Cubists, then the Abstract Expressionists, then was completely kaput by 1995, only to return with a vengeance just a few years ago. Also, globalization and cultural circulation have been occurring for a very long time, as various forms of mediation (including the book itself, with its attendant *dangers*, at least in the eyes of some strict orature preservationists, etc.). There are more people on earth these days, vying for more attention through a variety of organs, but I don't believe that we've settled into a period of mediocrity, especially if, as you say, you dig beneath the surface chatter. Zengotita's book and articles are pretty fascinating, and echo what so many others before him have pointed out; have you ever read Neil Postman's work? Benjamin, McLuhan, Adorno, Marcuse, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others have expounded on aspects of these arguments as well. Interesting that you mention Marías; he's turned up in Jstheater a few times, though if I recall only Reggie commented on the posts. Hanh I've never read; I am familiar with the concept of mindfulness, though, particularly through Ellen Langer's and Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi's great books on the topic, and while browsing in the bookstore came across an interesting book on the topic, through the lens of psychotherapy, last year. It's by Germer, I think. Evora: saudades!

I made two assaults on Marias' Si te dicen que cai and was shot off the battlements both times-- although I had native speaking Cuban professor tutoring me on the second attempt! I am convinced that certain writers who know a second or third language well perversely concentrate idiomatic/ untranslatable/ chronistically and regionally dialetic language in their writing to an extent that strenuously resists the non-native speaker's attempts to penetrate the text (even my Cuban professor was struggling mightily!) You remember that short story of Thomas Glave's about the two teenagers in Decatur? Imagine an even quite-fluent-in-English Chinese student trying to read that story in the original (never mind how much would be lost in any translation!): it would be almost indecipherable. My pride hasn't let me resort to reading Marias in translation. I'm still gathering myself for a third assault, hoping to make it at least half-way through this time ...

Kai, you make a great point about certain types of prose (and poetry). I'd suggest that it really does depends upon the author's aim in terms of her work, and her capacity for utilizing and exploiting the linguistic and rhetorical possibilities and registers of her source language. Sometimes writers who have almost little or no familiarity with other languages can be the *most* difficult, while those who are fluent in other languages can be fairly transparent to the translating reader. Borges, for example, was quite fluent in English (it was his first language) and a range of Spanish registers in Argentina, having grown up both in the city and in the countryside, but his Spanish is not especially difficult to get through. (At least that's my experience.) On the other hand, José Lezama Lima, who drew upon prior Spanish models (the baroque) extensively, traveled only once outside Cuba, etc., is quite difficult to translate, or even read for that matter, given his dense, serpentine syntax and deeply imbricated allusiveness. Perhaps the hardest Spanish-language writer I have ever encountered is Julián Ríos; have you ever read anything by him? I remain amazed that his POUNDEMONIUM was translated at all! Marías's rhetorical gifts, in the service of a subjective elusiveness or ellipticality (is that even a word) make his work quite difficult, but I would recommend Vidas escritas, which I found in the university library and was able to get through. It's now out in English, from New Directions, and is delightful. I would read sections of it to my class, to their boredom, but I keep going back to it again and again. Another Spanish writer I find tough: Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, the Puerto Rican master, though my experience has been that Luis Rafael Sánchez is several orders tougher still, in part because he weaves slang and music into his guarachas y sones verbales....

You make a good point. I don't think every polylingual writer does it by any means, but I'm sure certain writers, especially if they translate themselves, enjoy a little devilment, imagining the tears, late nights, and feverish ingenuities of their future translators (and foreign born graduate students). Borges' language is so transparently latinate that I can read him quickly and easily without a dictionary. Juan Rulfo (have you read Pedro Paramo?) is a much more difficult writer both for the Mexican back country dialect he writes in and his passion for the thesaurus. I remember the first time I read "Luvina": I learned six or seven synonyms for "hills" on the first two or three pages! That dude wears me out.

When I was living in Spain, El Pais published a list in the sunday magazine of the 10 most important books of the posguerra: Si te dicen que cai was number 1. Hence my obsession with getting through that novel in particular among Marias' obras (not to mention the outrageous romance of the novel's title...) There are many expressions and references peculiar to Barcelona (and its catalan-speaking populace) during the Franco-era concentrated in that book, which adds to the syntactical and elliptical difficulties. But Vidas Escritas you say? I think I'll take you up on that, so I can participate intelligently in your next mention of Marias.

Kai, I've only read Pedro Páramo in English translation. I've heard it's tough in Spanish. Apropos of nothing, I can tell you that when I was first learning Portuguese and was reading continental Portuguese vs. Brazilian literature, I always (and still do) found the former much more difficult, because of the compression of the idiom. I can recall one moment where I spent almost 20 minutes talking with my teacher about how to translate the very simple phrase "o som da montanha." Was it "sound" or "ring" or "tone" or "call"--all the possible meanings were compressed in the world "som." In the Portuguese of almost any Brazilian writer, as my Azorean teacher noted, the exact meaning would have been clearer.

Have you thought of looking at the English translation of Marías's novel, and comparing it to the Spanish? I've done that sometimes with very difficult texts as a revelatory process.

BTW, and you probably know this, but he has a blog page at Javiermaries.es.